$6.6 Billion in U.S. Currency Has Flown the Coop

The United States government in 2003 printed up $6.6 billion in money and flew it to Iraq. The money disappeared.

This has been known for years. It so perfectly illustrates how the U.S. government works that no one in charge says anything. This is the biggest robbery of currency in history, yet hardly anyone knows about it. The media run little stories on it from time to time, but it never became a big deal. Ho hum.

Here is a June 2011 story in the Los Angeles Times.

After the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the George W. Bush administration flooded the conquered country with so much cash to pay for reconstruction and other projects in the first year that a new unit of measurement was born.

Pentagon officials determined that one giant C-130 Hercules cargo plane could carry $2.4 billion in shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash — enough to run the Los Angeles Unified School District or the Chicago Public Schools for a year, among many other things.

For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an office created by Congress, said the missing $6.6 billion may be “the largest theft of funds in national history.”

If you have not heard about this, you get my point. Nobody really cares.

How can anyone in his right mind defend the fact that the government printed this money?

The U.S. cash airlift was a desperation measure, organized when the Bush administration was eager to restore government services and a shattered economy to give Iraqis confidence that the new order would be a drastic improvement on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

The White House decided to use the money in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq, which was created by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to hold money amassed during the years when Hussein’s regime was under crippling economic and trade sanctions.

The cash was carried by tractor-trailer trucks from the fortress-like Federal Reserve currency repository in East Rutherford, N.J., to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, then flown to Baghdad. U.S. officials there stored the hoard in a basement vault at one of Hussein’s former palaces, and at U.S. military bases, and eventually distributed the money to Iraqi ministries and contractors.

But U.S. officials often didn’t have time or staff to keep strict financial controls. Millions of dollars were stuffed in gunnysacks and hauled on pickups to Iraqi agencies or contractors, officials have testified.

House Government Reform Committee investigators charged in 2005 that U.S. officials “used virtually no financial controls to account for these enormous cash withdrawals once they arrived in Iraq, and there is evidence of substantial waste, fraud and abuse in the actual spending and disbursement of the Iraqi funds.”

Pentagon officials have contended for the last six years that they could account for the money if given enough time to track down the records. But repeated attempts to find the documentation, or better yet the cash, were fruitless.

This is how the Pentagon works. It always has.

But we taxpayers must account for every dime.

Anyone who thinks that the U.S. government is anything than a sinkhole for taxpayer funds that is run by people who cannot trace their spending is living in a fantasy world.

Will this ever stop? Yes. When the U.S. government goes bankrupt. Not before.

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http://www.petition2congress.c... Go to this website and sign the petition to vet Obama and check into his eligibility to be president. Send this to everybody on your mailing list. Ask them to do the same. We must keep up the pressure on congress till they do the right thing. If the link doesn't work, cut and paste.

Make sure you pay your taxes down to the last dollar or the IRS will get you. Got to make up for the 6.6 billion "lost" in Iraq. Isn't it time the government was held accountable for its excesses? We the People have let the government get way out of hand just because we foolishly trusted it.

This was a scam to steal the money from the getgo. Corporations, or anybody else needing big cash to do business elsewhere in the world don't carry C-notes around to do business. They use bank transfers and other forms of money.